Vessel of Spirit

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Vessel of Spirit

from the Litany of Loreto

The theme of this title is containment.

Mary is the vessel of safekeeping and incubation.

She is the baptismal font of new life.

She is the tabernacle.

In Judaism, the tabernacle is womblike and 

contains all of God's revelation that is

nonetheless continually unfolding.

It is not a binder of old texts, but a releaser

of new and neverending revelations.

The Great Mother was seen as the container of all that

is.  A dark side of containing captivity,

in which the feminine energy ensnares us and inhibits us.

In the aspect she crushes independence - 

a feature taken over, like most of the dark side of the feminine,

by the patriarchy.

The Egyptian goddess of the sky is Nut.  Her image, with embracing arms,

was painted in a sarcophagus so she could 'hold' the dead body

and thereby prepare it for resurrection.

The Great Mother was seen in many traditions as holding us

in the container of a grave, the incubator of rebirth.

In every image of the Great Mother we see Mary.

Mary is called a Vessel of Spirit,

a Vessel of Honour and the Singular Vessel of Devotion.

These titles were added to the Litany in medieval times when

alchemy was popular.  Alchemy was not literally about

transforming lead into the gold.  

The vessel in which the leaden ego is transformed into the gold

of spiritual wholeness is the spiritual enterprise represented by the

science of alchemy. The Litany avers that the alchemical

transformation that is our spiritual destiny can happen in the body

of the divine feminine, that is, in the cosmos.

In the metaphor of the alchemical vessel, we encounter

the two maternal themes of forming and transforming.

We see Mary then as the vessel of gestation of Christ

and of all of us. 

The painful process of letting go of self-centredness occurs

so that the gold of God-centred wholeness can appear.

  extract from When Mary becomes Cosmic by David Richo